Running a Book Club

May 4, 2015 8:58 PM

What should I know about running an online book club?

I am starting up a book club. I already have plenty of interested people, and plenty of excellent (nonfiction) books in our niche to pick from, but I've never run a book club before.

I'm looking for advice from people who've run or been members of online book clubs that either succeeded or failed. What worked or didn't work? What are the big pitfalls to avoid? What service/platform do you recommend - googlegroups, a mailing list? How do you pick the books - voting, round-robin, or something else? How do you moderate and encourage good discussion? How do you keep people interested and sticking around?

posted by subject_verb_remainder to Media & Arts (1 answer total)

Have you checked out Goodreads? You can set up a group (public, restricted, secret, etc.) for your bookclub and have polls for choosing your next book, etc. It also lets you control email into digest form, individual, emails or just notifications. I'm a member of a huge public bookclub so I don't know how it is on the administrative side, but as a user it's great.

If your bookclub is small, you can also set up a Facebook group. My 10 person real-life bookclub uses that, and it's also great since you can calendar meetings and set up polls.
posted by gatorae at 7:08 AM on May 5, 2015 [2 favorites]